Recovering data from faulty flash drive?

AirWolf

AirWolf

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Hi:)

Is there any way to extract data from a faulty flash drive? My colleague at work had some important documents stored on an old (5years+) flash drive but it seems to be faulty. Xp in unable to install the drive and says that a usb device connected to the system has malfuntioned. The device manager also comes up with unknown device under USB Contollers. I have tried it on several machines without success.

Any ideas?
 
Quite often the flash drive is toast at that point.

I've had a few go, I've only been able to recover one by getting one of our techs to touch the chip up with a hot air gun because one of the legs on the chip had come up off the board.

If the USB loadclient isn't recognising the device as a FAT filesystem, you might have a serious issue. All USB device report a small numeric string when you plug them in to the OS and the OS loads the drivers assocaited to that.

you can try a data recovery lab like :http://www.cssi.co.za/cs/content/index.cfm?navID=1&itemID=6

and for the love of god! teach your colleague to BACKUP important documents. Hard drives for backups and flash disks for movement.
 
If you are familiar with linux, plug the stick into a linux box and mount it, you may be able to access the data that way. I work for a company that manufactures their own flash memory devices, and that method has often worked for me in the past... You could boot from a small bootable live linux distro, like DamnSmall or Puppy or something to achieve this if u dont have a box handy!
 
If the stick is 5 years old, it probably has been inserted and removed quite a lot. Check the contact areas of the plug and maybe clean them if you can.
If you have a friend that is good with electronics (current limiting, voltae regulated 5v) check if the usb-disk is taking more power than it should (under 250ma or something just check) and recondition (replace?) the usb plug, check for dry joins and the usual electronic suspects :p
 
Use File Scavenger, I've recovered plenty discs this way. But if it's a hardware fault then you might be out of luck.
 
Ryder_JHB said:
If you are familiar with linux, plug the stick into a linux box and mount it, you may be able to access the data that way. I work for a company that manufactures their own flash memory devices, and that method has often worked for me in the past... You could boot from a small bootable live linux distro, like DamnSmall or Puppy or something to achieve this if u dont have a box handy!
Click to expand...

I'm using Ubuntu Feisty Fawn. It is supposed to mount USB flash drive automatically. It comes up with the following messages in the terminal:
Code: 
Jun 15 19:05:08 sky-desktop kernel: [  265.259062] usb 2-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 2
Jun 15 19:05:08 sky-desktop kernel: [  265.826005] usb 2-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3
Jun 15 19:05:09 sky-desktop kernel: [  266.392954] usb 2-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 4
Jun 15 19:05:10 sky-desktop kernel: [  266.919980] usb 2-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 5

Then nothing. Usually the drive appears on the desktop, but not this one:( Unplugging and re-inserting only has the effect of changing the addresses above to 6,7,8,9 etc
 
repitah said:
If the stick is 5 years old, it probably has been inserted and removed quite a lot. Check the contact areas of the plug and maybe clean them if you can.
If you have a friend that is good with electronics (current limiting, voltae regulated 5v) check if the usb-disk is taking more power than it should (under 250ma or something just check) and recondition (replace?) the usb plug, check for dry joins and the usual electronic suspects :p
Click to expand...


Good point - I have to move it a bit after plugging it in before the led comes on.
 
n1hilist said:
Use File Scavenger, I've recovered plenty discs this way. But if it's a hardware fault then you might be out of luck.
Click to expand...
Oh aye, File Scavenger FTW, *all* the way! My old faithful stick cotched up its filesystem after the covering came off and revealed the guts in all its nekkid glory and my usual recovery app was utterly failing to see a damn thing ..'Scavenger just pulled a bunch of stuff off the drive that was otherwise lost to me.
 
bdt said:
Oh aye, File Scavenger FTW, *all* the way! My old faithful stick cotched up its filesystem after the covering came off and revealed the guts in all its nekkid glory and my usual recovery app was utterly failing to see a damn thing ..'Scavenger just pulled a bunch of stuff off the drive that was otherwise lost to me.
Click to expand...


The flash drive comes up as unknown device, and doesn't get assigned a drive letter because it is not recognised as a mass storage device, so how do I use file scavenger in this case?
 
sky.akash said:
The flash drive comes up as unknown device, and doesn't get assigned a drive letter because it is not recognised as a mass storage device, so how do I use file scavenger in this case?
Click to expand...
Seems your filesystem is more stuffed than mine is ..maybe you'd want to go the other way round and see if GDB can do anything.
 
regarding the drive letter... try to put inside other good flash drive to your system... then see the letter.... then you should have the same letter for your faulty flash drive
 
@slumbermann, you have to choose the drive letter from a drop down list. If your system is not seeing that device correctly, the drive letter won't be in the list.
 
bdt said:
Seems your filesystem is more stuffed than mine is ..maybe you'd want to go the other way round and see if GDB can do anything.
Click to expand...


Tried GDB, and got nothing because the flash drive doesn't come up in the list:( Time to toss the drive i think:p Good thing it is not mine:D
 
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